Hi all,
Just wanted to share some experiences after recently upgrading to 1Gbps Virgin Media package. After getting the upgrade, I wanted to verify I was getting what I paid for and as such I went on a mission to try and observe download speeds near the 1Gbps package quoted speed of 1130Mbps.
It seemed however, that the maximum I could get initially was around the 800Mbps mark on any speedtest site or large downloads.
I checked samknows/realspeed which shows you your input speed your hub is receiving. It's the number on the left. That number has to be above 1000Mbps to prove that you even have a chance of receiving those speeds on a PC. The number on the right however, cannot be trusted one bit. More on that later...
Anyway, so after verifying my hub receiving the 1Gbps (you can also do this by logging into your hub), but I wasn't getting the speeds... So I made a a few upgrades.
- I upgraded my CAT5e cabling, which maxed out at 1000Mbps. From my understanding, to be able to use the full speed, you will need at least a CAT 6 cable, which is capable of up to 10Gbps (10000Mbps). CAT7 or 8 will also work.
- I connected directly to my VM hub. I originally had a switch in between which was limiting my speeds.
- I upgraded my network card. You need a network card which can handle the increased speed, such as 2.5Gbps. Search "2.5Gbps ethernet card" on Amazon. After installing, check the status of the network adapter and make sure you can see a speed of 2.5Gbps.
After sorting the hardware, I then went back to check my speeds on various speed tests; speedtest.net, fast.com, samknows, which, thinkbroadband, etc, etc.
Not a single speed test showed me anything near the speeds I should be getting, despite the hardware supporting up to 2.5Gbps. Speedtest.net however, was the highest by far of around 850Mbps.
Samknows was especially confusing because of the number on the left, but the number on the right (the actual speed test) has been consistently the lowest one out of the bunch. It cannot be trusted.
So, was I actually getting the speeds I paid for? In fact... YES I WAS. I took to Steam to download some games and found that I was in fact almost maxing out the speed being sent to my hub:
A little conversions shows me I was in fact receiving 1144Mbps, as I peaked at downloading at 143MB/s:
So, moral of the story? You can't trust speed sites when you have a fast 1Gbps connection. Perhaps it's due to their capacity, load, methodology or some other dodgy stuff... The best way to test your speed that I have found is to go and actually download something from a big service with lots of capacity, such as Steam.
Hope this helps.
Hi, I'm using a hub 5 (annoyingly I can't edit my post!) but of course, I am using the 2.5Gbps port on it too, with a cat8 cable as stated above.
There's clearly something odd going on with speedtests in general then, because I have never seen one above 1000Mbps, despite clearly getting those speeds on real downloads. It's very odd and misleading which is rather confusing to customers if they use the speedtest sites as a trustworthy metric for 1Gbps speeds - because they are not. Especially samknows realspeed who I have contacted directly.
Here's a speedtest I just did using the exact same server you did in yours:
Yet on Steam a few seconds later....
Going into my Orbi NBR750 router settings via the browser, I can see the max is 1gb but there is also an option of WAN aggregation:
The Max through one port of 1GB probably explains the 940Mbps.
However if WAN integration allow higher speeds, does anyone know if the Hub 5 supports WAN aggregation? (and what is LACP-IEEE802.3ad?!)
